Saturday, July 30, 2011

Norway's Anguish

The world looks on with compassion, and speaks in hushed tones of the courtly and calm democracy, the social advocacy and the graceful accords that Norway has achieved within its society. Norway, where the Norwegian Nobel Institute hands out the Nobel Peace Prize annually, although it is Sweden which established the Institute and a Swede, Alfred Nobel, that is responsible for its establishment. Still, it adds a touch of nobility to the country.

Given Norway's history during the Second World War with its counterpart of the French Vichy government, through its own Quisling regime, deferring to Nazi Germany in its fascist occupation of the country, where 15,000 Norwegians saw fit to join the fascists, it has enjoyed quite a fascinating history. The country considers itself now devoted to the expression of human rights and equality, as a compassionate, socially advanced nation.

Although Norwegian police, like their counterparts in Great Britain, are not armed with firearms, the country has more than one firearm for every five people. The popularity of hunting and competitive shooting contrasts oddly with a gun-loving population being comfortable with the peculiarity of its police force being unarmed in the pursuit of its professional security duties.

Not only are the Norwegian police unarmed, but they appear also to have been ill equipped, with access to a single vessel that malfunctioned when in an emergency response to a mad killer, police had to borrow a private vessel to gain access to the island where mass killings were ongoing. Calm self-assurance appeared to be somewhat vaguely missing in the enterprise of inhibiting an ongoing massacre.

And the helicopter that they were equipped with evidently was inadequate to their needs as well, while that belonging to a news organization buzzed overhead, giving false hope of imminent rescue to the young people hiding from the crazed murderer whose predations went unchecked for over an hour, long after police were notified of the massacre.

Police, to begin with, when contacted by frantic parents whose children, actively being targeted by a mass murderer, texted their parents for help, refused to honour the integrity of the parental messages. "Get your children to call us themselves", parents were peremptorily advised by the police.

"What happened is that I was absolutely not believed when I explained what my daughter on Utoya had told me. I was told if that was the case, the children had only to call the police themselves. Even when I begged them to take me seriously," explained one incredulous father.

When police eventually did confront the murderer, Behring Breivik, he faced them unthreateningly, hands up in the air, prepared to be taken into custody. His mission, after all, was accomplished as he saw it; the bombing in Oslo to distract police and where seven died, and the 68 young people he shot to death on the island to demonstrate his rage at Muslim immigration changing Norwegian society.

What he did also succeed in doing was to give ample ammunition to the left who excuse lavishly the 'misunderstanding' leading Muslims to be accused of terrorism and mass killings. For here is a right-wing ideological lunatic who in the name of resisting Muslim immigration to Europe - with its threat of overtaking and subverting European society and its mores poses a cultural-religious-political threat of immense proportions - commits a gruesome slaughter of the innocents.

All those, therefore, who abhor Islamist political ideology that seeks to infiltrate the West and upend democracy, while in the process both through influential persuasion and violence, manages to alter liberal democracies and their laws for the purpose of paving the way for an Islamist renaissance of power over non-Muslims, are now tainted with Breivik's madness.

This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.